Hard-hitting Debuts to start this summer: The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne, Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie, Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin
The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne (Fleet £20, 416pp)
I raced through this multi- generational, magical realist story about the Devil trying to get back into the good books of the Almighty using members of a black family.
Yetunde is the first to be visited by the Devil, when she wakes up surrounded by dead bodies on a slave ship from Africa towards a hellish life in captivity in America.
The Devil offers Yetunde salvation in return for an eternal bargain, which forms the basis for the various stories of eight generations of Yetunde's family over the next century and a half.
At pivotal moments, each protagonist is visited by the Devil and offered a desperate choice. From slavery through to modern racism, each generation's pain incorporates that of the previous. Compelling.
Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie (The Borough Press £16.99, 320pp)
Narrator Sophie is a junior culture writer for a national newspaper covering the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
It's business as usual with lots of parties and little sleep until Sophie's theatre critic colleague and festival flatmate, Alex Lyons, becomes embroiled in a scandal.
Alex is known for his one-star, brutal reviews and dashes off an eviscerating takedown of comedian Hayley's one-woman show. Alex then meets Hayley in a bar and sleeps with her, barely considering the words about to hit the newsstand.
Hayley channels her rage into a new show about what a disgusting person Alex is. It's a smash hit, and the aftermath is life-ruining for Alex.
Beautifully written and brilliant on trolling, nepotism and misogyny. I loved it.
Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin (Summit Books £16.99, 320pp)
Protagonist Smith is a black, queer, handsome Stanford graduate.
His elegant existence is destroyed when he is caught taking cocaine outside a fashionable nightspot. His family and wealthy friends are horrified when he is pulled into the court system.
Since Smith's best friend Elle – the daughter of a famous soul singer – was recently found dead, people have been cutting him some slack around his drunken bad behaviour, but an arrest is a step too far for his parents.
Smith learns the hard way that although his class protects him from certain things, his race often creates harsher consequences.
Gripping.
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The millennium is back – not just in fast fashion or TikTok remixes, but in the mood of American fiction. Think peak Chabon and Eugenides; the intellectual gymnastics of Helen DeWitt; the last profane and puckish gasp of Tom Robbins. That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans. Joyce Carol Oates channelling Marilyn Monroe. Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah. You can feel that early-00s energy jostling through a new crop of American novels: Lucas Schaefer's The Slip, Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! and Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle are top-shelf examples. They're big in all kinds of wonderful, infuriating ways: antic, overstuffed and richly peopled. While it's less hyperactive than some of its book-fellows, Susan Choi's Flashlight still has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold. Stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, Choi's sixth novel reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires. Flashlight first appeared in the New Yorker as a short story – a standoff in a psychiatrist's office. The novel opens here too. It is the late 1970s: 10-year-old Louisa has been dragged in for a consultation, and she's not playing nice. She waits out the clock, evading, deflecting; a tight little knot of fury. 'This room is full of tricks to get children to talk, but you're too smart for them,' the doctor flatters her. 'I'm too smart for compliments,' Louisa snaps back. Louisa's father has drowned, and her mother has turned into a strange new invalid. What the girl feels defies grief or sympathy. This isn't mourning, it's mutiny; and it will take more than some avuncular desk jockey to tame her. 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'The sum of things she knew about her father could fit inside the sum of things she'll never know about him an infinite number of times,' Choi writes. 'The things she knows are as meagre as a pair of backgammon dice rattling in their cup.' Flashlight is a study of absence – absence of narrative, of inheritance, of place, of affection. Who are you, it asks, when there's no story to inherit, no history to claim? How might that void be filled, or inhabited or weaponised? It's a year for canon building, and as the best-of-the-century (so far) lists are tallied, Choi's previous novel, 2019's Trust Exercise, remains firmly on mine. It begins as a high-school drama, libidinous and gossipy, but midway through, Choi triggers a controlled implosion. From the wreckage, another story emerges: one about power, authorship and blame. Truth isn't fixed, Choi shows us here – it's framed. I love this novel's confident chaos, its metafictional brio. 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Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Like the best of those early-00s novels, Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger. Choi confronts a chapter of North Korean history that American fiction has barely touched. But there is something missing. That Y2K brand of irony – glib, evasive, laddish – is gone. Good riddance to it. It's hard to be flippant when you know which way the arc of the universe really bends. Flashlight by Susan Choi is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
